Sunday, January 12, 2014

This Day in History: Jack Chaney is born in San Francisco, later to take the name London from his stepfather, living a wild life of a vagrant, getting arrested and later going on to enroll at the University of California at Berkeley, only to drop out in 1897 to join the Klondike Gold Rush in Alaska, a region which gave him material for some of his best stories, including "The Call of the Wild", 1876; the "Schoolchildren's Blizzard" of the northwestern Great Plains engulfs a region from Montana down to north Texas, temperatures dropping by nearly 100 degrees in 24 hours and stranding millions of people in 5-foot high snow drifts, including young kids returning home from school, taking 235 victims in one of the worst Winter storms ever recorded, 1888; 'Amos 'N Andy' premieres on WGN Radio in Chicago, the parody of black folks becoming hugely popular and later spawning a T.V. show, 1926; young, handsome, cocky Joe Namath and the New York Jets stun the country by defeating older, more experienced quarterback Johnny Unitas and his Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III, one of three great teams in New York which made headlines that year with outstanding players- including the Mets and the Knicks, 1969